A year ago today - 24th of June 2022 - the United States Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v Wade. Since this ruling, 26 states now have laws (or are trying to pass them), restricting abortions after 12 weeks or sooner, with 15 of them banning abortion completely or with extremely limited exceptions. Debbie Mountford examines some of the myths around the ruling and why we have reason to rejoice.
A year later
Contrary to how it was represented in the media, the overturning of Roe v Wade didn't make abortion illegal anywhere in the US. In fact the Dobbs v Jackson decision (the case that would ultimately become the death blow to Roe) didn't impose any particular view about the nature of unborn life - at all!
It was in fact the Roe decision in 1973 which imposed a specific moral view on the American people. Namely, that unborn life was of so little importance, that the states were not allowed to protect it by law in the first six months of pregnancy, even if they desperately wanted to. It's worth remembering here that prior to Roe, a clear majority of the US was pro-life and 30 states had near outright bans.
It was Roe that inserted the Supreme Court into the abortion debate, and politicised the Court. Dobbs took the Court back out of it, and as the constitution demands, handed the power to vote and regulate on this issue back to the people. In this sense it was a deeply democratic move. However there are a lot of un-truths surrounding it.
It won't reduce abortion, it will just reduce 'safe' abortion
This time last year one of the ladies on US talk show, The View, commented forcefully: "This is in no way going to reduce abortions, it's just going to reduce safe abortions"!
This claim is simply not true. We knew before Dobbs was decided that laws that restrict abortion also reduce abortion, both legal and illegal.
This was observed all across the US, and it has been seen internationally as well. When you control for pregnancy rate, it becomes clear that the percentage of pregnancies aborted is higher in countries with permissive abortion laws.
Even in the UK, we know this to be true. Whilst trying to safeguard protections for the unborn in Northern Ireland, a pro-life group made the claim that 100,000 people are alive today, because of the country's abortion laws. This claim was contested, but the Advertising Standards Agency upheld it as being true.
However, most strikingly, we now have a report on abortion numbers from within the US over the last year, and it comes from a pro-choice group! Their findings estimate a net reduction of circa 65,000 abortions in the United States over the last 12 months. That's 65,000 babies saved!
Referencing this report, a leading American pro-life organisation, told reporters at a press conference in May, that if legislation were to go into full effect in all 26 states, roughly 200,000 abortions would be stopped per year. From a Biblical perspective how could this ever be a bad thing?
But it gets better, did you know that restricting abortion also reduces unintended pregnancy rates. As one of our Argentinian colleagues once said, "Growing up in Argentina where abortion was illegal, I was terrified of the idea of sleeping around because I knew that inevitably sex would lead to pregnancy, and I was not ready to take that risk."
It will harm women
The second charge levelled at pro-lifers is that criminalising abortion will put women's lives at risk. Aside from wild accusations that women will be put in jail for miscarriage or refused treatment if their life was at risk - all of which are permitted under the exemptions of pro-life laws - the greatest objection was that women would be harmed by seeking out unsafe abortions.
This is one of the most emotive attacks that come from the pro-abortion lobby, but it just doesn't hold water when properly examined!
Even back in 1960, more than a decade before Roe legalised abortion across the US, the then Medical Director of Planned Parenthood, Mary Calderone, admitted that "abortion is no longer a dangerous procedure, in 1957 there were only 260 deaths in the whole country attributed to abortions of any kind, legal or illegal. Ninety per cent of all illegal abortions are presently being done by physicians"!
Countries which have outlawed abortions where they had previously been legal (like Chile, Poland, Nicaragua and El Salvador), have seen maternal mortality rates continue to improve in the years following.
However, the sad truth is that the US has a big problem with maternal mortality, even with its extremely permissive abortion laws.
They have a higher maternal mortality rate than any country in Europe, and it has been steadily climbing for years. We often hear the claim that the death rate for women is higher if they give birth than if they abort, but according to the CDC, more that 80 per cent of these deaths are preventable!
Sadly of course, the risk of death to an unborn baby in an abortion procedure is 100 per cent.
What's more, while we are often confronted with the potential negative effects on a woman's mental health if she is denied an abortion, the data shows quite the opposite.
The largest ever meta-analysis, consisting of 22 studies covering more than 800 000 women, was published in The British journal of Psychiatry. It concluded that "women who had undergone an abortion experienced an 81 per cent increased risk of mental health problems". This same study indicated a 156 per cent increased risk for suicide!
It will harm children
The same host of The View mentioned earlier also commented that: "There's going to be more poor kids, there's going to be more kids in adoption, there's going to be more kids in foster care, there's going to be more abused kids."
No one wants to see children harmed. We are all deeply saddened by the number of children in the foster care system and rightly horrified when we hear of abuse.
However, our emotions can cloud our judgement here, so let's look at the facts.
For a start, the children (both here and in the US) who are in the foster care system, are those who were not aborted, despite freely available abortion. These are largely "wanted" children who, for whatever reason, tragically ended up in the foster care system, and as Christians we must absolutely come to their aid ... but by and large these are not the children who would have been aborted.
The waiting list to adopt unwanted infants is massive, up to seven years in parts of the UK. In the US there are between 1 and 2 million couples on the adoption register at any one time. There is not a lack of adoptive parents for unwanted, healthy babies. In the UK last year, more than 98 per cent of abortions were performed on healthy consenting mothers and healthy babies.
Moreover, we know from the (very pro-choice) Turnaway Study, that 96 per cent of women who wanted an abortion but were denied, no longer wished they could have had one five years later. By far, the majority of these women chose to parent.
There will be children who need our help, and as Christians we must step up here. We already foster and adopt at between two and three times the rate of the rest of society, but we can always do more.
However, the idea that we are going to see the foster care system flooded with children just doesn't stack up. Imagine the good we could do if the £100 million in taxpayers' money we plough into the UK abortion industry and the likes of MSI and BPAS were redirected towards helping mothers and their babies.
Dare to rejoice!
The unborn are living human beings, image bearers of God and so they are our neighbours.
We have a clear biblical mandate to love our neighbours and not to kill. There is much more that we can do to help mothers and their children, no one can deny that. But when was the last time you heard of an action that saved 65,000 lives in a year?
When the ladies on The View said, "There's going to be more poor kids, there's going to be more kids in adoption, there's going to be more kids in foster care, there's going to be more abused kids," one thing really struck me. They seemed to miss the point that there will be more living kids and fewer dead ones - 65,000 to be exact. Praise The Lord!
For a God who instructs us to "choose life" (Deut 30:19) surely this is a step in the right direction.
Debbie Mountford is a mum of 2 who holds a BSc (hons) in Human Physiology from the University of St Andrews. She previously worked in marketing and strategy for a FTSE 30 company, and is now a part time Media and Research Officer for CBR UK.
